World English Bible · Under Assyria
Isaiah 20
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In the year that came to , when Sargon the king of sent him, and he fought against and took it; at that time spoke by the son of , saying, "Go, and loosen the from off your waist, and take your from off your feet." He did so, walking and barefoot. said, "As my servant has walked and barefoot three years for a sign and a wonder concerning and concerning , so the king of will lead away the of and the exiles of , young and old, and barefoot, and with buttocks uncovered, to the of . They will be dismayed and confounded, because of their , and of their . The inhabitants of this coast land will say in that day, 'Behold, this is our , where we fled for help to be from the king of . And we, how will we escape?'"
A public domain modern English translation, free to read and share. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · Under Assyria, 745 BC to 612 BC ›
Assyria at full stretch, deporting whole populations as policy. The northern kingdom is destroyed in 722 BC and Judah survives as a tribute-paying vassal.
- Assyria
- The first empire to run mass deportation as ordinary administration: move the leadership somewhere else, settle strangers in their place, and the province stops being a nation. It worked. Samaria fell in 722 BC and the northern tribes did not come back. Assyria also advertised its cruelty deliberately, carving flayings and impalements on palace walls where envoys would see them, because terror is cheaper than garrisons.
- Judah
- Survives by paying. Hezekiah rebels, Sennacherib takes forty-six Judean towns and besieges Jerusalem in 701 BC, and the city holds. The Assyrian account boasts of shutting Hezekiah up like a bird in a cage and pointedly does not claim to have taken the city, which is one of the more interesting silences in ancient records.
- Egypt
- The splintered reed of a staff that Assyria's field commander mocks Judah for leaning on. It promises help and cannot deliver, and Isaiah spends decades saying so. Assyria eventually invades and sacks Thebes.
- Further afield
- Greece is in its archaic period, founding colonies from Spain to the Black Sea. Rome is under kings. Assyria's own libraries are collecting the literature of Mesopotamia, which is how Gilgamesh survived to be read again in the nineteenth century.
All of Isaiah